David Zweig

While Hong Kong’s political crisis is often seen as a major challenge to China’s leaders, a recent trip to Hunan province has brought home to me the Chinese state’s adeptness at turning the situation to its advantage. Given the Communist Party’s tight control over the media behind the Great Firewall, the Hong Kong narrative the party has created in the hearts and minds of Chinese citizens is basically: thank goodness I don’t live there. In fact, the violence in Hong Kong benefits Beijing. Generally, when I explained to mainlanders how Hongkongers want to defend the freedoms guaranteed by the Basic Law against the political tightening that has intensified since 2012, they understood. They, to

There are legal, political and technological facets to the Huawei incident that bear further examination. Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese electronics company, was arrested in Canada in December on fraud charges involving United States sanctions on Iran. From a legal perspective, it must be noted that the case is not that Huawei allegedly used a subsidiary to skirt US sanctions on selling US technology to Iran.  If that were the case, the argument of Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sachs – that Meng is being treated unfairly because the CEOs and CFOs of many companies guilty of similar offenses have never been arrested – would hold water. But, accord